GEERT KLIPHUIS, HIS NOVELS & A SCREENPLAY ABOUT SPAIN

Writing is, at least for me, the perfect antidote against mental oxidation. I began with a few dozen travel stories for NRC Handelsblad, the Rotterdam newspaper, and turned to writing novels, a few of which are now lined up for publication. In my stories, I aim at poetic realism, the research of facts merely being essential to good story-telling. One of my influences is the 12th century Spanish-Arab philosopher Muhammad ibn Rushd (aka Averroês), a man who tested every sacred tenet against humanist rationale. Heeding his axiom that "only the ill-informed search connections between what appears to be compatible", I enjoy bringing incompatible elements together without trying to make them fit. A fair example in my novel, The Mirror City, is a law student and trainee accountant, struggling to cope with the lawlessness and financial disasters of the Spanish Civil War. However, when the elements do fit, the event only proves that the world is an inexplicable, yet acceptable compromise between accidental factors and human effort.

Ibn Rushd, who also worked as a physician and Chief Justice in Cordoba, is the main character in the forthcoming The Council of Cruelty, a medical thriller, in which the judge is confronted with the consequences of the Catholic ban on surgery, proclaimed by the Council of Tours in 1163. The world of Islam, advancing steadily with their medical revolution in Spain and the Middle East, was aghast at this incomprehensible decision.

Where my favourite subject – Spain – is concerned, most of my writing revolves around coinciding worlds – Franco's dreadful New Order v. anarchic disorder, Cervantes v. Shakespeare – often at loggerheads with each other, searching for the correct equation. These days, we mostly seem to fail, yet in the end, the lighthouse of humanist rationalism swings its beam through even the darkest of nights. Or perhaps, we see that light because it is our darkest night... In The Mirror City, an imaginary Madrid reflects that beam, which is, more than often, emitted by those who are caught in the middle of human conflict. That is why the solution of The Mirror City, in its sequel, The Lens of Ibn Sahl, lies shrouded in the Law of Refraction, developed in 983 by the great Iraqi physicist, Sa'd ibn Sahl, who subsequently drew the world's first plan a plano-convex lens without optical aberrations.

The same basic idea appears in my screenplay, Our Years of Dust and Hunger, which describes the bizarre interrogations by British Military Intelligence of an exiled Spanish-Republican colonel, lost in Blitztime London.

http://hubpages.com/hub/MirrorCity

19 Brialmont St., B-1210 Brussels, Belgium, tel/fax 32 2 3506149 / mobile 32 2 485 294028 / gkliphuis@yahoo.es

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